Kimani Paul-Emile

Research and Teaching Areas

Health Law, Law and Biomedical Ethics, Anti-Discrimination Law, Race and the Law, Legislation and Regulation, Drug Regulation, Law and Society.

Bio

Kimani Paul-Emile is a Professor of Law; Associate Director and Head of Domestic Programs and Initiatives at Fordham Law School’s Center on Race, Law & Justice; and faculty co-director of the Fordham Law School Stein Center for Law & Ethics. Dr. Paul-Emile specializes in the areas of law & biomedical ethics, health law, anti-discrimination law, and race and the law.

Dr. Paul-Emile’s award-winning scholarship has been published widely in such journals as the Virginia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, George Washington Law Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and Annals of Internal Medicine, among others. For her article, "Blackness as Disability?," Dr. Paul-Emile received the Law and Society Association’s 2019 John Hope Franklin Prize, awarded for “exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law.” Her co-authored article, “Physician and Trainee Experiences with Patient Bias,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, won the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s 2019 John Benson Professionalism Article Prize. Dr. Paul-Emile's co-authored article on the clinical, ethical, and legal challenges attendant to dealing with racist patients in the hospital setting has been viewed over 149,000 times, placing it in the 99th percentile of articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and 99th percentile of all medical journals. Dr. Paul-Emile’s scholarship has appeared in or been covered by national and international news organizations and other outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CBS News, MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera America, and The Guardian.

In 2020, Dr. Paul-Emile was selected to serve as a Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) Fellow at Princeton University for the 2020-2021 academic year. She is also currently a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. In 2017, Dr. Paul-Emile was awarded a Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas Grant by the Greenwall Foundation for 2017-2019; and in 2013, the foundation chose her to receive a Faculty Scholars Award in Bioethics: an award intended to enable outstanding junior faculty members to conduct original research to help resolve important policy and clinical dilemmas at the intersection of ethics and the life sciences. In 2012, she was awarded a Public Health Law Research Grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s leading philanthropy on health and health care.

Prior to pursuing her doctoral degree, Dr. Paul-Emile served as Associate Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and practiced civil rights law at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she was a National Association for Public Interest Law (now Equal Justice Works) Fellow and later the William Moses Kunstler Fellow for Racial Justice. Dr. Paul-Emile also served as Senior Faculty Development Consultant at the New York University Center for Teaching Excellence.

Selected Publications

Addressing Patient Bias Toward Healthcare Workers: Recommendations for Medical Centers, (co-authored) Annals of Internal Medicine (July 14, 2020)
Physician and Trainee Experiences with Patient Bias (co-authored) JAMA Intern. Med. 2019; 179(12):1678-1685
- Winner of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s 2019 John Benson Professionalism Article Prize
How Should Organizations Support Trainees in the Face of Patient Bias?, AMA Journal of Ethics, 2019; 21(6): 513-520
“All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But some of Us Are Brave” (with Robin Lenhardt) 87 Fordham L. Rev. Online (2019)
Blackness as Disability?, 106 GEO. L.J. 293 (2018)
- Winner of the Law & Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize
When a Wrongful Birth Claim May Not be Wrong: Race, Inequality, and the Cost of Blackness, 86 FORDHAM L. REV. 2811 (2018)
Dealing with Racist Patients, 374 N. ENGL. J. MED. 708 (2016) [co-authored]
Foreword: Critical Race Theory and Empirical Methods, 83 FORDHAM L. REV. 101 (2015)
Beyond Title VII: Rethinking Race, Ex-Offender Status, and Employment Discrimination in the Information Age, 100 VA. L. REV.893 (2014)
Patients' Racial Preferences and the Medical Culture of Accommodation, 60 UCLA L. REV. 462 (2012)
The Regulation of Race in Science, 80 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1115 (2012)
Making Sense of Drug Regulation, 19 CORNELL J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 691 (2010)

Education

New York University, PhD
Georgetown University Law Center, JD
Brown University, BA, with Honors

Selected Awards/Honors/Fellowships

Program in Law and Public Affairs Fellowship, Princeton University (2020-2021)
John Benson Professionalism Article Prize, American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation (2019) (for Difficult and Discriminatory: Clinicians’ Experiences with Biased Patients)
John Hope Franklin Prize, Law & Society Association (2019) (for Blackness as Disability?)
Deans’ Distinguished Research Award, Fordham University School of Law (2018)
Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas Award, Greenwall Foundation (2018-2019)
Faculty Scholars Award in Bioethics, Greenwall Foundation (2013-2016)
Lawyers of Color’s “50 Under 50 List” (2014)
Public Health Law Research Grant, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (2011-2013)
Health Law Scholar, American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics and the St. Louis University Law School Center for Health Law Studies (2010)